The Best Cure for Obesity? Personal Responsibility | TIME.com

The Best Cure for Obesity? Personal Responsibility | TIME.com: You can bring disease on yourself, of course, like smoking-related lung cancer. Yet designating a state of being as an illness has a subtle distancing effect. It gently suggests that this turn of events is due either to outside forces or to weaknesses inherent in the body that are beyond your control. The AMA’s deeming alcoholism a disease in 1956 has encouraged some alcoholics to embrace Alcoholics Anonymous’ total abstinence and to recite at meetings, “I am an alcoholic,” not “I was.” For alcoholism is apparently not something you get rid of but something you have.